Piano 51

This piano, a walnut cased, Steinway patent grand at Polesden Lacey, a 1904 Model B, was noticed but not scored at reference 2. So visiting again on another pre-Christmas visit (to be noticed properly in due course), it seems fair to score it this time.

With the rather superior snap above being lifted from the National Trust, from reference 3, taken with rather more light than was available yesterday. I learn that it is not the piano that was here in the house's hey-day, rather a donation from one Denis Parker, probably much the same sort of piano, once the property of the pianist Rose Keen. The National Trust managed to raise no less than the the enormous sum of £36,000 to have it shipped to Cologne for restoration. BH has memories of pianos and piano related stuff being planted around the gardens at the time they did the fund raising - while I can raise nothing of the sort. Nor is clear to me how much of the original piano, apart from the case, is left. I associated to the expensive heritage work noticed at reference 6.

There seem to be a lot of Denis Parker's, so I was unable to trace this one, but I had more luck with Rose Keen, almost certainly the one at reference 7. The daughter of a baker (father) and confectioner (mother), a lady who was mixed up with Futurists and the art of noise, back in 1914, before settling down as a piano teacher.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/piano-50.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/osberts-day.html.

Reference 3: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/polesden-lacey/projects/restoring-our-steinway-piano.

Reference 4: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/polesden-lacey/features/tickling-the-ivories-20-june-2016.

Reference 5: https://youtu.be/Ihw-dRV0Pgo. The story on YouTube, the work of one Hannah Simion Malmcrona – visitor experience officer for the National Trust, a lady with a much bigger Internet footprint than I had expected from her job description. A lady who started out with the National Trust as a catering assistant; so maybe they do their own grub, rather than contracting it out, as is commonly the case.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/strawberry-hill-1.html.

Reference 7: https://miraculousagitations.blogspot.com/2015/06/rose-keen-and-futurists.html.

Reference 8: https://www.piano4u.com/Piano/Detail/1514. You can clearly pay a lot for a piano like the one which is the subject of this post. Perhaps this one is particularly expensive because of the ice cream cone legs.